San Francisco mansion joins Roam’s stable of co-living...

1of 81000 Fulton, the site of new Roam coliving spaces, is seen on Monday, April 16, 2018, in San Francisco, Calif.Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

2of 8Bruno Haid, Roam co-founder, stands in a shared dining room at the mansion, which he believes responds to a need for community.Photo: Photos by Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

3of 8The lobby of the Roam co-living space at the Archbishop’s Mansion, which was built in 1904 and survived the ’06 quake, boasts opulent touches. The Alamo Square property adds 19 rooms to Roam’s global listngs.Photo: Photos by Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

4of 8A stained-glass window on the ceiling of the new Roam co-living space at the Archbishop’s Mansion.Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

5of 8Steven Romero, vice president of Direct Handyman Services, adjusts a doorknob on a room at the new Roam co-living space at the Archbishop’s Mansion.Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

6of 8A shared dining room in the mansion that also features a full basement with event areas and a workshop, an airy co-working room and a home theater.Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

7of 8Old fixtures are reused throughout the Roam co-living space at the Archbishop’s Mansion.Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

8of 8Books with their covers removed are stacked together under a table in a meeting room in the Roam co-living space at the Archbishop’s Mansion.Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

In a city of elegant residences, San Francisco’s Archbishop’s Mansion stands out. The building, erected in 1904 on a corner facing Alamo Square, is both stately and opulent. It survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, was home to several archbishops, hosted Pope Pius XII, and served as a convent, orphanage, reform school, rehab center, psychiatric hospital and bed-and-breakfast.

In its next incarnation starting May 1, the Archbishop’s Mansion will be part of a global social experiment called Roam, a co-living/co-working network based in New York that caters to digital nomads, with residential hotels offering community, creature comforts and high-speed Wi-Fi.

“There is a yearning toward authentic human connection,” Roam co-founder Bruno Haid said as he led a tour of the mansion’s ritzy features, including a mahogany grand staircase topped by a breathtaking stained-glass dome. “We want to create spaces to facilitate that.”

Group living is having a resurgence, spurred by rising housing costs and the urge to forge real-life friendships in the digital age. Co-living startups such as OpenDoor, WeLive, Starcity and Common have created communal houses in urban centers, sometimes derided as “dorms for grown-ups,” where residents rent rooms long-term and share amenities such as kitchens and living rooms. Roam’s twist is to cater to globe-trotting location-independent entrepreneurs, offering them far-flung locales to stay for weeks or months. Its prices are less than those of hotels, but more than rooms in traditional shared homes.

Roam, with locations in Bali, Miami, London and Tokyo, defies easy categorization. It’s like a chain of swank hostels but with longer stays and private bedrooms and bathrooms, or like boutique hotels with added camaraderie. It’s a business but also a social movement.

“You become part of a warm and enveloping community; that’s the joy and wonder of it,” said Dena Van Derveer, 63, a graphic designer formerly of Mill Valley who embarked on a nomadic lifestyle after getting divorced. She spent February at Roam’s Miami location, where she felt “welcomed with open arms” despite being much older than most other residents.

A room in the posh mansion is readied for guests. More than half of the property is common space.

Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

An accomplished cook, Van Derveer organized a pretzel baking party and drew plaudits for her challah, sourdough rye, cinnamon bread and hot cross buns. Staying at the Miami property, which has about 38 rooms in a four-house compound, cost $1,800 a month plus parking.

Roam’s fusion of work, travel and tourism is intriguing, said April Rinne, a consultant to on-demand companies who is not involved with Roam.

“It will never solve the problem of expensive housing markets, but it speaks to something that’s always been in our psyche but that we’ve covered up with ownership, privacy and anonymity,” she said. “I think they’re drawing people who seek to rediscover that sense of community, tapping a pulse that is starting to beat more strongly around the world.”

About a third of Roam members rove among its properties as their primary residences, Haid said, while the rest have their own homes but stay at Roam while traveling.

Generous shared spaces are part of Roam’s formula to encourage interactions. Given human nature, it tries to remove friction points, having common areas cleaned daily to avoid squabbles over dirty dishes, and providing huge refrigerators with labeled areas for each resident.

Conversely, the bedrooms are fairly spartan, with just beds, tables and lamps — no televisions, although in San Francisco most have fireplaces and chandeliers (and many have killer views of the postcard-row Painted Ladies or San Francisco skyline).

A bedroom in the Archbishop’s Mansion, which will rent 19 rooms to digital nomads.

Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

More than half of the Archbishop’s Mansion consists of public spaces, including a full basement with event areas and a workshop, an airy co-working room, a home theater, a sprawling chef’s kitchen and several dining rooms, bars and lounge areas.

The mansion, which Roam is renting for five years at an undisclosed price, adds 19 rooms to Roam’s worldwide stable of about 200 rooms. Reflecting the property’s upscale nature, they cost more than other Roam locations, renting for $1,200 a week, or $3,800 to $4,500 a month. When there are vacancies, Roam will list them on Airbnb or other sites. Because the property was already a licensed B&B, it complies with city laws, Haid said.

A photographer/illustrator, he appreciated the 20-room Chelsea building’s aesthetics. “As a solo traveler, it’s a nice hybrid space,” he said. “You can get lonely if you only stay in hotels.”

Backed by $4.5 million in capital, Roam is a lean operation, Haid said, with a core team of 14 plus the equivalent of three salaried people per property to serve as community managers, cleaners and maintenance workers.

The company had a positive cash flow last year and hopes to raise more money in the autumn to expand to 30 to 50 additional locations, including more sites in San Francisco and other popular cities, he said. New York is up next with a 150-unit building near Bryant Park set to open in late summer.

So far Roam has rented locations as a quicker way to set up shop, but it plans to start buying properties. Traditional real estate investors are willing to front the capital expenditures of buying and renovating, Haid said.

Haid learned about catering to travelers early, growing up on a farm B&B in the Austrian Alps in a village that had 24 people in summer and 5,000 in winter.

Living in a cryptocurrency-focused commune in San Francisco from 2011 to 2014 fueled his interest in community. “It was interesting to see the social dynamics of 40 people living together,” he said. “It was a little bit ‘Lord of the Flies’ — very libertarian.”

Then, on a trip to Bali, he was inspired to create a co-living space for other wayfarers. Although Roam taps into current trends, it also harks back to an earlier age, Haid said. Before the rise of suburbia, it was common for people to live in long-stay hotels or boardinghouses.

Roam arranges weekly dinners at each location — either Dutch treat at restaurants, or cooked in-house by residents with Roam footing the grocery bill — and travelers often host their own ad hoc events: yoga classes, in-house concerts, lectures on their areas of expertise, theater excursions.

“It’s now culturally accepted to live a relatively global life,” Haid said. “How do you create a home when you don’t have a permanent place? That’s what we’re doing.”

Carolyn Said covers the on-demand economy (new marketplaces such as Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb that let people rent their time, goods and services), the impacts of automation and AI on labor, and the world of autonomous vehicles. Previously she covered the housing market and foreclosure crisis, winning awards for stories that shed light on the human impact of sweeping economic trends. As a business reporter at The Chronicle since 1997, she also has covered the dot-com rise and fall, the California energy crisis, the corporate malfeasance scandals, and the fallout from economic downturns.